Group items tagged

"By now, even the most laggard of organizations understands that digital fluency is a pillar of any strategy seeking to engage audiences, cultivate constituent relations, and secure donors.  More than a "next practice," digital engagement is essential to the relevance and solvency of the contemporary nonprofit organization - simply keeping the doors open requires investments of time, talent, and treasure on digital platforms. But social media is playing an important role in how people relate to and understand nonprofit organizations beyond simply their ability to converse on Twitter or post pretty pictures on Facebook.  In our progressively crowd-sourced, collectively intelligent, peer reviewed world that values trusted endorsements foremost among reputation-enhancing communication channels, social media is emerging as one of the most important tools in the fundraising toolbox."

Why invest lots of time, effort and energy creating new course materials from scratch when quality, freely-available resources may already exist? Why not adapt and use these resources, known as Open Educational Resources (OER)?

"I am trying to answer this question that Learning Program Designers ask me, when I propose that we can include blogging as an activity for learners in their program design: 'Why should we invest time in convincing a learner to blog?'."

school productivity has not become part of the reform conversation, and with this project, our hope is to shine a light on how productivity differs across districts, as well as to identify key areas of reform. Moreover, for the first time, we conducted a special analysis of educational fiscal practices, diving deep into state budgeting approaches. We believe that if our education system had a more robust way of tracking expenditures, it could do more to increase productivity. Together with this report, we have also released analysis by CAP Senior Policy Analyst Robert Hanna on twin districts. Hanna's analysis looks more closely at the programs and practices of more effective districts.

"Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been working for years against what Pam Martens has called "running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests." FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product"."

"By the end of June, Murdoch's News Corp. will have invested more than $1 billion in Amplify, its division that makes the tablets, sells an online curriculum and offers testing services. Amplify, which never set a timetable for turning a profit, has yet to do so. It reported a $193 million loss last year, and its annual revenue represented only about 1 percent of News Corp.'s sales of $8.6 billion."

"Labeling colleges as the "worst" is controversial of course. But with more and more Americans feeling like they've been priced out of college or are not getting bang for their buck, questions of value and return on investment are getting lots of attention, especially from the Obama administration."

instead of two years, it would last 10 months-long enough to make friends, participate in experiential parts of the program, and become members of the club. They would pay a fee for the immersion, but not the balance of their tuition. After that, students would graduate into the work force, but they would stay enrolled at Wharton on a subscription basis. One day, a Wharton subscriber working in investment banking might get put on a team that oversees mergers and acquisitions. Instead of aching to recall the lessons she learned back in business school (and later forgot), she takes an online "minicourse" from Wharton. "The new pattern becomes learn-certify-deploy, learn-certify-deploy," the professors write in their paper.

"The new university/company AI partnership model will resemble the current online program management model, in which the AI company de-risks the AI investment with up-front capital and resources, and is paid by a revenue share."

"Key findings from the report include: When publishers bundle a textbook with an access code, it eliminates most opportunities for students to cut costs with the used book market. Of the access code bundles in our sample, forty-five percent-nearly half-were unavailable from any other source we could find except the campus bookstore. This eliminated student's ability to shop around and meant that they were forced to pay full price for these materials. For the classes using bundles, students would likely be stuck paying full price, whereas for the classes using a textbook only, students could cut costs up to fifty-eight percent by buying used online. Schools that have invested in open educational resources (OER) generated significant savings for their students. OER are educational materials that can be downloaded or accessed for free online while carrying many other benefits for students and professors. For example, in Massachusetts, Greenfield Community College's use of OER in three of the six courses in our study meant that students there could spend as little as $31 per course on materials, compared to a national average of $153 per course. Switching the ten introductory classes in our study to OER nationwide would save students $1.5 billion per year in course materials costs."

Referenced by @tealia "Higher education institutions that want to significantly increase their student success outcomes must design their policies, practices, and organizational culture to promote the engagement and leadership of their faculty and staff. Colleges that invest in designing engagement and empowerment strategies that leverage the talent and dedication of faculty and staff are likely to produce more meaningful and sustainable results."

"Automation is a difference in determining whether or not institutions merely dabble with badging vs. truly invest in a sustainable badging program that benefits the students."

"Australian company's investment of roughly $165 million in Coursera and FutureLearn suggests open course providers have found a viable business model. Not everyone is sold."

And in many states, a larger state appropriation is part of a compact that lawmakers are striking with college leaders: We'll give you some extra cash if you agree to freeze tuition. It's a bargain that legislators and higher-education leaders are willing to make in order to stem the rising costs of college.

"Enrollment at America's largest for-profit university was about 460,000 students five years ago. Now it's 213,000."